4 ms·

Google ads are a con. Meta ads are a con. If someone tells you you’re just not doing it right yet, they’re probably trying to sell you something.

jLaForest 23d ago
This was also my experience wasting $1500 on Google ads
- reddalo 23d ago
  The main problem with Google Ads is that Google tries to squeeze money out of you in all possible ways. I think the only sane way tu run a Google Ads campaign is to: - only enable Google Search ads (i.e. disable all third-party publishers -- this may be a bit extreme but it's good if you're advertisting a niche product that people are actually searching for) - only use "exact match" keywords ("broad match" is so broad that Google will show your ads in completely unrelevant SERPs) - disable AI Max - disable all automations - reject any of their "optimization" tips - set a max CPC even if they say it's bad for you In other words, reject everything they suggest you to do. Maybe I'm wrong, or maybe this only works for my use case, but that's how I've been using Google Ads succesfully without wasting money.
  - myth2018 23d ago
    Also: run experiments to find an "optimal" budget with the right size for your target audience. If you, e.g., set a too restrictive geographic rule, but also set a budget higher than what they manage to burn showing your ads at the area you defined, they will override the rules you set up to guarantee 100% of your money will be burnt.
  - cube00 23d ago
    > only enable Google Search ads Except then they just don't run your ads unless you're willing to pay silly amounts like $3 per click for bot traffic.
G3nD 23d ago
Are pretty much all ecommerce brands wasting their money on Meta ads? Seems hard to believe.
- bluegatty 23d ago
  yes, they are wasting money, they know it, but caveats: famous saying 'i'd cut my ad budget in 1/2 if i knew which 1/2 to cut' 'attribution' is the holy grail of hard thing in marketing. so they know for sure the channel spend is iffy. but it's hard to measure, esp. for brand and indirect campaigns. so as a 'starting point' - it's a very 'noisy channel problem'. the next wild idea is that ads come from a marketing budget which has $X to spend, and they have to spend it. this is where the ROI stuff is wildy upside down. large companies with 'market power' have a lot of surplus. they put that towards relatively lucreative marketing. the $ must be spent. the cmo makes a budget, allocates, the managers follow the campaign, front line staffers spend. they try to get the best results they can. there is often an unbelievable lack of true roi concern in all of that. sometimes it's very aggressive, aka for some keywords, for sure. but a remarkable amount of $ is spent in very unnacountable way, over what are 'grey' channels anyhow. the marketing ops person is going home at 5pm and does not care one bit about bots. they were paid to spend it, they did. Facebook is paid to 'show a chart of view' ... they did that. 'everyone is happy'. im not saying the whole system works that way, but much of it does. the wild part is - there is so much 'dumb big money' in ads, it makes the whole thing very inneficient. companies like P&G have 'distribution monopolies' on so many packaged goods, they have to keep up brand awareness. It's why so many commercials are for commodity products like home stuff - the market is huge, the market channels are locked, they pay $$$ for ads for 'toothpaste' - the least novel and least productive kind of thing imaginable. so 'Colgate' costs $5 at the store, it costs 50 cents to manufacture - that $4.50 gross margin is stuffed into a system of relative inneficiency up and down the economy. much of it in 'nearly useless ads'. it's a deep market inefficiency people dont want to recognized because people assume private capital is inherently efficient and that a dollar spent = GDP = value and that's it. our lives could materially be improved if we banned ads for a lot of things - feels like 'socialism' but really it'd just be about a kind of 'regulated market efficiency'.
  - 23d ago
raincom 23d ago
If one runs a small business, one has to pay Google/Meta; otherwise, their businesses will be bottom of the search. It is a tax now.
nostrademons 23d ago
It works great if your goal is to pump up your install & conversion numbers so you can raise the next round of VC at 3x valuation. After a couple rounds of this, your VCs, in turn, can then use the valuation increase to tell their GPs that the value of their fund has increased by 10x. The GPs can use your reported valuation increase to report that they earned a 11.6% real return on the fund this year (13% nominal, using the reported CPI of 2.4%, which of course is nowhere near the actual increase in life's necessities but does show that you can get TVs cheap), and that therefore they beat their benchmark and should get their full bonus. Then the pension funds that invest in them can tell the state that everything is fine and of course every retiree will get everything due to them. It's bullshit all the way down. The most valuable bullshit is the numbers that you can sell to someone else who is looking for bullshit. They're not lying; they are merely reporting what they are being told, and you can't fault them for trusting their ad networks / investees / LPs / LPs / pension plans.
- dakolli 23d ago
  Probably the most succinct description of this phenomenon I've seen in a long time.
- gruez 23d ago
  >the reported CPI of 2.4%, which of course is nowhere near the actual increase in life's necessities but does show that you can get TVs cheap I went through the CPI basket[1] and vaguely looked for categories "life's necessities" and came up with "Food and beverages", "Shelter", "Fuels and utilities", "Transportation", "Medical care", "Education and communication". Those categories alone make up 85.3% of the basket, and I didn't even bother going into detailed categories to look for other essentials. "Televisions" on the other hand makes up 0.1%. I'm sure there's more non-essentials on there, but 85% of the CPI basket being non-essentials seems... pretty reasonable? If anything, it's weighted more towards essentials than typical consumer spending patterns.
  - mitxela 23d ago
    What did gas cost a year ago and what does it cost now?
SoftTalker 23d ago
Not limited to ads.
dzohrob 23d ago
idk, i’ve spent six figures on meta ads in the last few months and gotten tons of real users for my app. how is that a con?
- wyre 23d ago
  How has been the return? 6 figs is a lot if your users aren't earning you that money back.
  - jay_kyburz 23d ago
    I dabbled with this 10-15 years ago. I always ignore all numbers on the dashboard. All I care about is how much I paid, and how much revenue went up in following weeks. I never could quite get that number positive.
- cube00 23d ago
  Ah yes, the "you're not spending enough" excuse, Reddit loves to use that one me.
heap_perms 23d ago
this is the only correct response.
dam_jackalopes 23d ago
Eh, I think you're correct in most cases but they work relatively well for our property leasing office. There's a convergence of factors at work there though; small number of high priced products being offered to a relatively small number of people in a certain geo location.
cube00 23d ago
Add Reddit Ads to that, all the alleged clicks not one comment or conversion. I get my app is probably bad but you'd expect at least one comment out of 100 "clicks" to say something.
- emdash 23d ago
  I have a theory that there are far fewer genuine users on Reddit at this point than you'd expect.
  - cannonpalms 23d ago
    The incentives to create fake engagement to satisfy their actual users who want discussion are quite clear. Doing this also gives reddit an advantage when monetizing their data. Scrape posts & comments for free, and you won't know which are LLM-generated and which at least have a human in the loop (but the human still may use an LLM, so this is where fingerprinting comes in). Perfect for incentivising the ai labs / other consumers of reddit data to pay up for an official feed.
  - calmworm 23d ago
    Reddit may be the most manipulated social media there is.
    - astura 22d ago
      Yep, it's mostly bots, shills, and children and it's nothing new. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2017/02/20/reddit-is-being-manipulated-by-big-financial-services-companies/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2017/02/20/reddit-i...
  - dspillett 23d ago
    Going back to its roots: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/v8xgq/watch_reddit_cofounder_steve_huffman_explain_how/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/v8xgq/watch...
  - jiggawatts 22d ago
miohtama 23d ago
Guess why we are getting “age verification” everywhere, lobbied by Meta. It is not to protect the children.
- mitxela 22d ago
  It's to remove Meta's liability for failing to protect children. They only have to protect children if the parent selects an age less than 16.
singingtoday 23d ago
We have a customer who's seeing ~30k in monthly revenue driven by their meta ads. So they can work. But they have a consult running the ads, and I assume they're doing filtering or something.
ksajadi 23d ago
Maybe I’ve just been unlucky for 14 years but ads almost never work (as much as you pay for them). Ad business is the best business: you pay for something no one can reliably verify or measure. But you still pay because there is something somewhere with some correlational relationship with an uplift in some of your metrics and you’re afraid to turn it off. So you just keep paying. If you login to the admin side of any ad business (Reddit Ads, X Ads, LinkedIn Ads etc) you are faced with a severely broken product: broken buttons, obviously wrong metrics, and other glaring bugs. But somehow you still trust that people who cannot pull the CRUD side of the product off, are going to serve your ad accurately to the targeted audience and give you reports.
- killbot5000 23d ago
  I always wonder who the hell is clicking these ads. I skip all you tube ads (thanks Adblock)… I never click banner ads on principle. I assume anything paying for my eyeball time is a scam. So who is this shit working on? These companies must have detailed profiles on “people who do what we tell them” as a whole class of people. Scary.
  - ulfw 23d ago
    Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of actual end customers/humans (i.e. not bot farms or paid for actors) who click are not clicking on purpose. I've seen so many bad Android apps that have performance issues where content is still rendering and by the time you've tapped on where you go an add banner/link loaded up and registered you clicking on that. Zero purchase ever done but numerous 'ad clicks' generated
  - Brybry 23d ago
    My elderly parents regularly click the sponsored links in Google search results. I don't think it even registers for them that they're ads (even though I have informed them multiple times). Same for sponsored items in Amazon search results. As an adblock user it's really jarring to see their experience of the web compared to my own.
- Gustomaximus 23d ago
iammrpayments 23d ago
Spent a lot of money on meta ads and it worked well for a long time. What doesn’t work is the nonsense people try to teach about how to optimize it. It’s what got me into programming in first place, since most strategies can be automated, but there are still companies paying money to people to manage their ad spend.
petesergeant 22d ago
Company I work for sees significant real, profitable traffic from them. I’m sure we’re losing some proportion to fraud, and we have a very experienced guy full-time on ad management, but money in vs money out is working very nicely for us.
lnrd 22d ago
This is plain untrue and misinformed, there's an entire category of companies where the whole business model is to pump money into ads to push their own apps and games. They carefully make sure that cost to acquire one paying user is lower than the amount of money the paying user brings. They usually achieve this by aggressive conversion tactics in the app and overly optimized ads with hundreds of variants. There's a whole industry built around this.
redshiftza 18d ago
I think its probably based on loads of really hard to pin down factors.A big factor IME is product/market fit.As an anecdote, my wife and I relocated a few years ago and that meant giving up her 10 year+ word of mouth referral clients. In that city we had no success with meta or google ads . In the new city with no client base she started advertising on meta with self produced ads and it was so successful she was at 3x revenue over the previous client base in 2 years.Still growing!

jLaForest 23d ago

This was also my experience wasting $1500 on Google ads

reddalo 23d ago
The main problem with Google Ads is that Google tries to squeeze money out of you in all possible ways. I think the only sane way tu run a Google Ads campaign is to: - only enable Google Search ads (i.e. disable all third-party publishers -- this may be a bit extreme but it's good if you're advertisting a niche product that people are actually searching for) - only use "exact match" keywords ("broad match" is so broad that Google will show your ads in completely unrelevant SERPs) - disable AI Max - disable all automations - reject any of their "optimization" tips - set a max CPC even if they say it's bad for you In other words, reject everything they suggest you to do. Maybe I'm wrong, or maybe this only works for my use case, but that's how I've been using Google Ads succesfully without wasting money.
- myth2018 23d ago
  Also: run experiments to find an "optimal" budget with the right size for your target audience. If you, e.g., set a too restrictive geographic rule, but also set a budget higher than what they manage to burn showing your ads at the area you defined, they will override the rules you set up to guarantee 100% of your money will be burnt.
- cube00 23d ago
  > only enable Google Search ads Except then they just don't run your ads unless you're willing to pay silly amounts like $3 per click for bot traffic.

G3nD 23d ago

Are pretty much all ecommerce brands wasting their money on Meta ads? Seems hard to believe.

bluegatty 23d ago
yes, they are wasting money, they know it, but caveats: famous saying 'i'd cut my ad budget in 1/2 if i knew which 1/2 to cut' 'attribution' is the holy grail of hard thing in marketing. so they know for sure the channel spend is iffy. but it's hard to measure, esp. for brand and indirect campaigns. so as a 'starting point' - it's a very 'noisy channel problem'. the next wild idea is that ads come from a marketing budget which has $X to spend, and they have to spend it. this is where the ROI stuff is wildy upside down. large companies with 'market power' have a lot of surplus. they put that towards relatively lucreative marketing. the $ must be spent. the cmo makes a budget, allocates, the managers follow the campaign, front line staffers spend. they try to get the best results they can. there is often an unbelievable lack of true roi concern in all of that. sometimes it's very aggressive, aka for some keywords, for sure. but a remarkable amount of $ is spent in very unnacountable way, over what are 'grey' channels anyhow. the marketing ops person is going home at 5pm and does not care one bit about bots. they were paid to spend it, they did. Facebook is paid to 'show a chart of view' ... they did that. 'everyone is happy'. im not saying the whole system works that way, but much of it does. the wild part is - there is so much 'dumb big money' in ads, it makes the whole thing very inneficient. companies like P&G have 'distribution monopolies' on so many packaged goods, they have to keep up brand awareness. It's why so many commercials are for commodity products like home stuff - the market is huge, the market channels are locked, they pay $$$ for ads for 'toothpaste' - the least novel and least productive kind of thing imaginable. so 'Colgate' costs $5 at the store, it costs 50 cents to manufacture - that $4.50 gross margin is stuffed into a system of relative inneficiency up and down the economy. much of it in 'nearly useless ads'. it's a deep market inefficiency people dont want to recognized because people assume private capital is inherently efficient and that a dollar spent = GDP = value and that's it. our lives could materially be improved if we banned ads for a lot of things - feels like 'socialism' but really it'd just be about a kind of 'regulated market efficiency'.
- 23d ago

raincom 23d ago

If one runs a small business, one has to pay Google/Meta; otherwise, their businesses will be bottom of the search. It is a tax now.

nostrademons 23d ago

It works great if your goal is to pump up your install & conversion numbers so you can raise the next round of VC at 3x valuation. After a couple rounds of this, your VCs, in turn, can then use the valuation increase to tell their GPs that the value of their fund has increased by 10x. The GPs can use your reported valuation increase to report that they earned a 11.6% real return on the fund this year (13% nominal, using the reported CPI of 2.4%, which of course is nowhere near the actual increase in life's necessities but does show that you can get TVs cheap), and that therefore they beat their benchmark and should get their full bonus. Then the pension funds that invest in them can tell the state that everything is fine and of course every retiree will get everything due to them. It's bullshit all the way down. The most valuable bullshit is the numbers that you can sell to someone else who is looking for bullshit. They're not lying; they are merely reporting what they are being told, and you can't fault them for trusting their ad networks / investees / LPs / LPs / pension plans.

dakolli 23d ago
Probably the most succinct description of this phenomenon I've seen in a long time.
gruez 23d ago
>the reported CPI of 2.4%, which of course is nowhere near the actual increase in life's necessities but does show that you can get TVs cheap I went through the CPI basket[1] and vaguely looked for categories "life's necessities" and came up with "Food and beverages", "Shelter", "Fuels and utilities", "Transportation", "Medical care", "Education and communication". Those categories alone make up 85.3% of the basket, and I didn't even bother going into detailed categories to look for other essentials. "Televisions" on the other hand makes up 0.1%. I'm sure there's more non-essentials on there, but 85% of the CPI basket being non-essentials seems... pretty reasonable? If anything, it's weighted more towards essentials than typical consumer spending patterns.
- mitxela 23d ago
  What did gas cost a year ago and what does it cost now?

SoftTalker 23d ago

Not limited to ads.

dzohrob 23d ago

idk, i’ve spent six figures on meta ads in the last few months and gotten tons of real users for my app. how is that a con?

wyre 23d ago
How has been the return? 6 figs is a lot if your users aren't earning you that money back.
- jay_kyburz 23d ago
  I dabbled with this 10-15 years ago. I always ignore all numbers on the dashboard. All I care about is how much I paid, and how much revenue went up in following weeks. I never could quite get that number positive.
cube00 23d ago
Ah yes, the "you're not spending enough" excuse, Reddit loves to use that one me.

heap_perms 23d ago

this is the only correct response.

dam_jackalopes 23d ago

Eh, I think you're correct in most cases but they work relatively well for our property leasing office. There's a convergence of factors at work there though; small number of high priced products being offered to a relatively small number of people in a certain geo location.

cube00 23d ago

Add Reddit Ads to that, all the alleged clicks not one comment or conversion. I get my app is probably bad but you'd expect at least one comment out of 100 "clicks" to say something.

emdash 23d ago
I have a theory that there are far fewer genuine users on Reddit at this point than you'd expect.
- cannonpalms 23d ago
  The incentives to create fake engagement to satisfy their actual users who want discussion are quite clear. Doing this also gives reddit an advantage when monetizing their data. Scrape posts & comments for free, and you won't know which are LLM-generated and which at least have a human in the loop (but the human still may use an LLM, so this is where fingerprinting comes in). Perfect for incentivising the ai labs / other consumers of reddit data to pay up for an official feed.
- calmworm 23d ago
  Reddit may be the most manipulated social media there is.
  - astura 22d ago
    Yep, it's mostly bots, shills, and children and it's nothing new. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2017/02/20/reddit-is-being-manipulated-by-big-financial-services-companies/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2017/02/20/reddit-i...
- dspillett 23d ago
  Going back to its roots: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/v8xgq/watch_reddit_cofounder_steve_huffman_explain_how/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/v8xgq/watch...
- jiggawatts 22d ago

miohtama 23d ago

Guess why we are getting “age verification” everywhere, lobbied by Meta. It is not to protect the children.

mitxela 22d ago
It's to remove Meta's liability for failing to protect children. They only have to protect children if the parent selects an age less than 16.

singingtoday 23d ago

We have a customer who's seeing ~30k in monthly revenue driven by their meta ads. So they can work. But they have a consult running the ads, and I assume they're doing filtering or something.

ksajadi 23d ago

Maybe I’ve just been unlucky for 14 years but ads almost never work (as much as you pay for them). Ad business is the best business: you pay for something no one can reliably verify or measure. But you still pay because there is something somewhere with some correlational relationship with an uplift in some of your metrics and you’re afraid to turn it off. So you just keep paying. If you login to the admin side of any ad business (Reddit Ads, X Ads, LinkedIn Ads etc) you are faced with a severely broken product: broken buttons, obviously wrong metrics, and other glaring bugs. But somehow you still trust that people who cannot pull the CRUD side of the product off, are going to serve your ad accurately to the targeted audience and give you reports.

killbot5000 23d ago
I always wonder who the hell is clicking these ads. I skip all you tube ads (thanks Adblock)… I never click banner ads on principle. I assume anything paying for my eyeball time is a scam. So who is this shit working on? These companies must have detailed profiles on “people who do what we tell them” as a whole class of people. Scary.
- ulfw 23d ago
  Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of actual end customers/humans (i.e. not bot farms or paid for actors) who click are not clicking on purpose. I've seen so many bad Android apps that have performance issues where content is still rendering and by the time you've tapped on where you go an add banner/link loaded up and registered you clicking on that. Zero purchase ever done but numerous 'ad clicks' generated
- Brybry 23d ago
  My elderly parents regularly click the sponsored links in Google search results. I don't think it even registers for them that they're ads (even though I have informed them multiple times). Same for sponsored items in Amazon search results. As an adblock user it's really jarring to see their experience of the web compared to my own.
Gustomaximus 23d ago

iammrpayments 23d ago

Spent a lot of money on meta ads and it worked well for a long time. What doesn’t work is the nonsense people try to teach about how to optimize it. It’s what got me into programming in first place, since most strategies can be automated, but there are still companies paying money to people to manage their ad spend.

petesergeant 22d ago

Company I work for sees significant real, profitable traffic from them. I’m sure we’re losing some proportion to fraud, and we have a very experienced guy full-time on ad management, but money in vs money out is working very nicely for us.

lnrd 22d ago

This is plain untrue and misinformed, there's an entire category of companies where the whole business model is to pump money into ads to push their own apps and games. They carefully make sure that cost to acquire one paying user is lower than the amount of money the paying user brings. They usually achieve this by aggressive conversion tactics in the app and overly optimized ads with hundreds of variants. There's a whole industry built around this.

redshiftza 18d ago

I think its probably based on loads of really hard to pin down factors.A big factor IME is product/market fit.As an anecdote, my wife and I relocated a few years ago and that meant giving up her 10 year+ word of mouth referral clients. In that city we had no success with meta or google ads . In the new city with no client base she started advertising on meta with self produced ads and it was so successful she was at 3x revenue over the previous client base in 2 years.Still growing!